Google Maps Bike There…for a safer, healthier, happier world. :-)

The price of oil is helping to put the squeeze on people, and it’s just a real bad situation. When you read the accounts of people who are losing or who have recently lost their homes, you kinda think to yourself, ‘man, that’s bad‘, or ,’this is not supposed to happen‘.

I actually don’t know the situation in the rest of the world, but here in America, foreclosures are just about out of control – lots of people in lots of cities and towns all over the country are losing their homes – and this problem is not just about people losing their homes – it’s the myriad other problems that come with massive amounts of foreclosures:

The mortgage foreclosure crisis has caused a drop in cities’ revenues, a spike in crime, more homelessness and an increase in vacant properties, a survey of elected local officials out today shows.

About two-thirds of 211 officials surveyed by the National League of Cities reported an increase in foreclosures in their cities in the past year, according to the online and e-mail questionnaire. A third of them reported a drop in revenues and an increase in abandoned and vacant properties and urban blight.

“There’s a reduction in revenues at the same time that more services are needed,” says Cynthia McCollum, president of the National League of Cities and councilwoman in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville. “Because of foreclosures, people are stealing, crime is on the rise and we don’t have more money for cops on the street.”

While it might not be fair to suggest that a feature addition to Google Maps could save millions of Americans from losing their homes, I do think it is fair to suggest that a ‘Bike There’ feature addition could really help those people who were determined to not lose their homes by doing whatever they could to fight off foreclosure – even if it meant giving up their car.

People could sell one of the family cars, which could mean giving up a car payment, insurance payment, gas payments, maintenance and upkeep payments, etc.

The problem, of course, is that folks have no reason to think that they could cycle to work – it hasn’t entered the public conscience yet – for many reasons. And that keeps folks in their cars, because the only alternative to a car, they believe, is taking mass transit everywhere, which equates to a loss of control. When you ride a bicycle, you are still in control – an important and compelling distinction for which the bicycle has not yet been given its proper due – in my humble opinion. I pass people sitting or standing at bus stops all the time, and I know they’re thinking about it – ‘could I ride a bike to get where I need to go?‘ And then they think, ‘Nope – too dangerous.‘

A Google Maps ‘Bike There’ feature can help, here, by showing people realistic bike routes that have already been designated as such by cities and towns and organizations all across America and around the world – routes where there may even be a full-on bicycle lane so that you don’t have to dodge cars and SUVs and pickup trucks to within inches of your life.

The implementation of a ‘Bike There’ feature does not have to mean that Google is evangelizing bicycles over other forms of transportation – it could just mean that they’re responding to tremendous market demand – and that would be fine with me – and that’s part of what this petition is all about. I believe that tremendous market demand exists – this petition is just a way to fuse the millions of voices from around the world into a unified show of support for such a feature.

I drove up north of Austin, yesterday, to an area of town known as The Arboretum – an ‘upmarket retail trade area‘. There is just lots of ‘stuff’ out there – stores, restaurants, movie theaters, hotels, etc. In driving the mass and mess of highways to get there, I thought to myself, ‘man, if I wanted to go shopping up here, there’s no way I could bike up here’. It just seemed too crazy – just thousands and thousands of cars zooming around in every different direction – I couldn’t think of a place I’d less rather be when riding my bike.

But all of this might have been false thinking. If I was able to pull up Google Maps and have it provide bicycle directions to The Arboretum, the route obviously would have been much different. The ‘Avoid Highways’ checkbox would be useful, of course, but it would not go far enough. If I was able to look at bicycle directions on Google Maps and see that a bicycle trip was possible, then what other trips would become possible? How many other Austinites would see the ‘Bike There’ option on Google Maps and think ‘I wonder if I could do that?‘.

Lots of Americans know they need to take drastic measures to avoid foreclosure, and sometimes, even selling your car won’t help, but it would be great if we could give folks just one more tool to help keep themselves afloat.